


Alpha

by Apostrophic



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s06e16 Alpha, Established Relationship, F/M, Season 06, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-28 21:44:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5106782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apostrophic/pseuds/Apostrophic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Their edges overlapped, bled, blurred together. Territorial, intimate. They laid claim to each other and then moved through their lives as though nothing had changed.</em>
</p><p>What were they ever going to do with this? A domestic post-episode tag. “Alpha,” season 6.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alpha

He made it home no more than forty minutes behind her. She was in the bathroom, scrubbing her face clean of the day’s layer of makeup and grime when she heard his keys in the door, his keys hit the table, the refrigerator open. She walked in the room, drying her face. He stood at the counter with his shoes off and his trench coat on, slicing a tomato. She hadn’t made it much further herself: shedding only her coat and shoes, still in slacks and shirtsleeves, but she had eaten as soon as she came in. The cutting board was on the counter, the rye loaf she had left out for him. Last week he had tried to slice a tomato with a dull dinner knife and she had scolded him for turning it into a pulpy mess, demonstrating to him the difference when the proper knife was used, the thin curved blade and serrated edge. He had looked at her, possibly wondering what he had gotten himself into, a woman who had a different knife for everything. He used it now, though, slicing the tomato, stabbing a slice with the forked tip when it tried to slip off the board.

She opened the refrigerator and pulled the jar of mayonnaise off the door. He didn’t make a face when it was ‘Lite,’ or dredge up the lectures he had in seemingly inexhaustible supply. When he wiped off the tomato knife and stuck it in the mayonnaise, she didn’t say a word, watching him spread it over the bread. She handed him the salt, too, when he reached for the pepper, to grind a few kernels. He topped his sandwich with the second slice of bread, smushing it flat with his hand, and shed his coat over the back of a chair. He didn’t entirely shed the basement gloom with it. “You sure you’re okay?” she asked him, against better judgement.

Mulder sighed and pushed the plate back on the countertop and turned and wrapped her up. Caught unawares, she had to wriggle a bit to work her arms free enough to go around his neck. It was one of his needy hugs, clinging and lonely, burying his chin against her collarbone. “Just tired,” he told her, scratchy against her neck. She stroked her fingers through his hair. “And I’ve missed you,” he said.

In California they had honored the terms of their formal arrangement, if only barely. Interacting only as partners, working the case, and it had been more difficult than she imagined. On the upside, she found it easier to agree to his 16-hour days when the alternative was a hotel bed without him in it. She sighed. What was she ever going to do with this? The only time the loneliness shook out of his bones was when he was beneath her, or above her, or had her against some upright surface. Her face went hot and it did not take protracted analysis, of course, to determine that she was the kettle calling the pot black. She touched the back of his neck. “I missed you too,” she whispered against his skull. He pulled them apart and smiled down at her and kissed her, the kind of kiss where she left her eyes open, his face smushed into a blur. He turned back to his sandwich, not bothering to cut it in halves, taking a third of it with the first bite.

She watched him for a moment, the way she would a stranger. Trying to see him as someone would for the first time. The faint lines in his face; his gray eyes, tired. But his strong features— handsome, defined. There was a visible kindness in him, a vulnerability antithetical to the distance he tried to keep from the world. He glanced up, caught her watching. He held onto her gaze. His chewing had slowed and he swallowed. 

“What kind of steps,” he said, “do you have to take to avoid that kind of life?”

She blinked, brought back to the moment. It was not the train of thought she expected from him. It surprised her to find she understood what he meant. “What kind of life?” she said. “Lonely?”

“Karin,” he said. “Closed off to the world, living in the dark.” He smiled. “Me, down in the basement.” He chewed another bite. “I mean, I _am_ home. I’m back there. That’s what I wanted. That was the goal, right? Living the dream.”

A pause. She said quietly, “Hey. I’m down there, too.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know. I just keep thinking. Scully, what’s the alternative?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, seriously. What’s the alternative? Ditch it all and get a house in the suburbs? That’s fucked up.”

She chewed her lips on a grin. So did he. Reluctantly, some light coming into his eyes in spite of himself. She watched him square up the edge of what was left of his sandwich before he took a bite. The tomato had slipped.

“Mulder, if this is all about me,” she said. He interrupted.

“It’s not about you,” he said around a mouthful of rye.

She waited to make sure he was done interrupting.

“If this is about me,” she continued. “You should know. I don’t want a house in sierra beige, or sienna beige, or desert tan either. Any more than you do.”

“What about sienna sage?”

Mock-sorrowfully, she shook her head no.

“Don’t worry, I know,” he said. “I know. But you do want _something_ more, right? If _I_ do, you have to. Something more than...” 

She finished it for him. “Whatever the fuck this is?” 

He repeated it. “Whatever the fuck this is.”

Sighing, she turned to sweep the crumbs from the counter. She ran the water, rinsing her hand, then shut off the tap. 

“I don’t know, Mulder,” she finally said. “And I don’t know how to figure it out. And tonight...” It was all she could tell him. “I’m too tired to try.”

He nodded. He had finished the sandwich. He reached past her, adding the plate to the sink, clinking the dishes already piled there. When he went for the cutting board she pushed it back, out of reach. “Tomorrow,” she said, abandoning her efforts to tidy the mess. 

He said, “You’ll get ants.”

“Yes.” She ran her hands over his arms, up to where his shirtsleeves bunched and rolled at his elbows. He pulled her close, conducting a study of how her waist fit in his arms.

“Infestation,” he told her. “A plague.” He murmured it into her neck. “They’ll eat you out of house and home.” 

“Mm,” she said, stretching her neck to give him more access. His hands slid up under the back of her shirt, warm and persuasive. “There’s something else I’ve missed too,” she whispered into his ear, circling it with her finger. Laying her cheek against his. She said, “My bed.”

He squeezed her waist. “Can I second that, Scully.”

Rolling his shoulders in a weary stretch. “Come on,” she said, leading him out of the kitchen. 

At the door to the bedroom, she parted ways with him, splitting off for the bathroom. He reached out, caught her back by the edge of her shirt. 

“You know we’re screwed, right?” he asked her sincerely.

 _A dozen ways, just to Sunday._ Yes. She knew.

“How so, this time?” she asked.

He paused in her bedroom doorway. He did that thing, undoing his tie, the mock seduction, the shameless flirt. “You can’t stop flirting with me at crime scenes. We can’t be married for every case as a cover.”

She took the end of the tie out of his hand.

“You’re right in that we’re screwed,” she said. She tugged it once, then smoothed the tie down over his chest. “But flirting at crime scenes, that’s the least of our problems.”

The last second, before she shut the door on the bathroom, she turned back to give him a look. He was grinning at her, that new dark tie of his hanging askew.

Alone at the sink, she ran the water hot, steaming her face, then cold, over her toothbrush. She moved the bristles around her mouth. What were they going to do? She sighed. She had been so sure they could do this, keep the one life— professional— separate from the other. Telling herself, that’s what she wanted. Telling herself, they had no other choice. Even Mulder knew otherwise, could say it out loud in the middle of her kitchen at nine o’clock at night. The truth of it: all the lines they had drawn, when had they had ever stayed inside them? Their edges overlapped, bled, blurred together. Territorial, intimate. They laid claim to each other and then moved through their lives as though nothing had changed. What _had_ changed, exactly? She’d never had boundaries, not when it came to him. Not from the start. She rinsed and spit and flicked off the light.

Mulder, in the bed, lay sprawled beneath the covers. On his stomach, eyes closed. She stopped in the doorway, watching him from a distance. His underwater face, his smooth, strong, long limbs. His mind: stubborn and mysterious. He was so sentimental, so fatalistic. He paired them romantically, a ruthless and biological level of devotion. In the shadows of the room, she shed her clothes, buttoned up the cool satin pajamas, slipped beneath the sheets.

Her weight dipped the mattress. He shifted, moving in, smothering her up, incorporating her into his sleep pattern hot and heavy as a St. Bernard. She worked an arm free enough to push off the covers, thinking ahead to the summer. Barely April and already it was too hot to sleep the nights Mulder buried into her shoulder. He slept as he lived when he woke, settled into every inch of her personal space.

“Mm,” he said, his face in her neck. Muffled into her satin pajamas, he told her, throat scratchy: “Five minute power nap. Then best sex of your life.”

A kiss and a yawn pressed into her shoulder. She reached up, touched the back of his scalp, let him pull her tighter. 

“Get some sleep, Mulder,” she whispered.

He nodded, his rough cheek catching the satin. He showed her five fingers which he then slid into her pajamas, down to her hip.

“Five minutes,” he promised.

She smoothed her hand down his arm, twining their fingers. “I know,” she said. “Get some sleep.”


End file.
